By Sue Mangan
“I feel at such a loss for words, but this place is a new place,
and new words are needed.”(Foster by Claire Keegan)
If only life were as simple as spring. One day, without announcement, sharp green swords begin to rise from the pocked, thin layer of snow covering the earth.
Winter is slow moving. Silhouettes of skeletal trees frame soft white clouds and cold blue skies. Tight buds of burgundy have barely begun to protrude from the overreaching limbs of the sugar maple tree.
Caught between winter and spring, the birds sense the need for a new herald. One of creation. One of hope. Nature speaks her own language.
Animals sense change before humans. Birds race from oak to towering pine prior to the onset of rain or the advent of storm. Cardinals curl into protective spheres, clinging to needles of fir, crimson feathers as bright as holly berries when rain crystallizes into snow.
When winter turns to spring, soil is the first to sense its arrival. Dense earth loosens in supplication to the merest degree of warmth. The air smells deeply of moss and minerals.
The journey toward spring begins in winter. Beneath the frozen earth, bulbs of hyacinth and narcissi leach onto nutrients, patiently waiting for the lengthening of sun-filled days.
While December bells toll for Christmas, shepherds in Ireland set rams into fields filled with ewes. Often the courtship is brief. Soon the ewes will be thick with the weight of their lambs.
The course of creation, the path of new life begins in the dark of winter, finally burgeoning in spring. Throughout the year, shepherds will move their sheep from pasture to pasture.
In Ireland, some sheep are bred for clinging to steep mountainsides. There they feast on samphire and wild herbs.
Close to the rugged strands, nutrient dense seaweed provides the sheep with a mighty feast. Salt spray clings to their thick coats of wool.
Other farmers lead their flocks of sheep to remote pastures to feed on sweet meadow grass and heather. Walking the isolated Bangor Trail in County Mayo, shepherd and dog steer the sheep to remote fields in the Nephin Mountains. Feeding on wildflowers, the pregnant ewes will nourish their unborn lambs.
Circle of Life
It appears nothing changes for the farmers and their sheep, yet everything does. Each season revolves around the course of nature: birth, life, and death. Cyclic, but everchanging.
When a ewe dies while lambing, the shepherd will often remove the hide of the dead mother, hanging it on the branches of a squat rowan tree. The hide will be used to wrap a lactating foster ewe in the hope that the orphaned lamb will suckle from her wet nurse, thinking it her mother.
There is a beauty to the connection between shepherd and animal, sheep dog and sheep. Imagine this life led by the wisdom of the seasons, the innate respect between living creatures: human and animal. All taking cues from the power of the earth and the gift of her seasons.
And so, new words will always be needed to describe the nuances that shade the course of life. We can anticipate dawn and sunset, the heat of summer, the fall of leaves. The journey will be paved with unique textures, flashes of precious color, and the challenge of unexpected trials.
Clarity arrives when an image is stripped of artifice. Like the haunting vision of sheep hide swaying from the branch of a tree in a remote Irish field, understanding might be masked by sadness and isolation.
Truth emerges from the darkness of winter, the sting of pain. Beauty is always there lying beneath the surface, waiting to suckle the warmth of sunlight, and rise with the fresh clarity of spring.
